Among the 19 authors Ellis interviewed for this book, there are two points of consensus. Almost all of the interviewees call revision the most essential element of successful writing, and in general they agree that a love of reading is the best preparation for a writing career. Ellis (Now Write!) is an astute reader. Her questions show insight and sensitivity. Most of her subjects—who include Jill McCorkle, Edward P. Jones, Paul Lisick, Ron Carlson, Margot Livesey and Julia Glass—seem open, candid and eager to talk about their creative process. (Yiyun Li, author of the novel Vagrants, offers the most provocative opinions.)

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“Indeed, as Timothy Green claims in Hiking Alone, perhaps all we ever want is a little darkness to climb out of. In American Fractal, he provides the dark, the light, and a rope of words for climbing from one insight to another.”

–Marjorie Maddox, BookMarks, WPSU (Pennsylvania NPR Affiliate), March 2009

(Listen to mp3 here)

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Opening Timothy Green’s first full-length collection is like entering a fun house and stepping into the room where distorted mirrors reflect back into themselves ad infinitum. The concept of the fractal, which the dictionary defines as a geometric pattern repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces, is the perfect metaphor for post-modern American life.

–Barbara Crooker, Mid-American Review, Fall 2009

Illuminating Fiction: Today's Best Writers of Fiction Sherry Ellis. Red Hen (Chicago Distribution Center, dist.), $19.95 paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-59709-068-1

Among the 19 authors Ellis interviewed for this book, there are two points of consensus. Almost all of the interviewees call revision the most essential element of successful writing, and in general they agree that a love of reading is the best preparation for a writing career. Ellis (Now Write!) is an astute reader. Her questions show insight and sensitivity.

(read more)

“

By John Sheirer (Connecticut) – See all my reviews

Reviewed for Nights and Weekends by John Sheirer

The nameless young girl at the center of Diane Payne's wonderful Burning Tulips is asked to write about an "important human" for a school assignment. She chooses instead to write about the family dog because, in her own words, "… it seems like all my important humans would make a sad story."

Such is life for Payne's protagonist, who grows from age five to eighteen and must deal with her mother's cancer, her father's abuse, her family's poverty, her growing sexuality, her constant spiritual crisis, her sense of social injustice during the turbulent 1960s-even her poor penmanship. With so much stacked against her, readers might expect a stereotypical self-pitying child/adolescent/teenager. She does experience plenty of anger, fear, shame, and sadness, but Payne has crafted a complex character brimming with humor, hope, strength, love, and a burning sense that her life has an abundant future despite her deprived and isolated present.

Payne's work has appeared widely in print and internet literary publications. In fact, many sections of Burning Tulips first appeared as outstanding stand-alone pieces, usually under the banner of "memoir." Whether this book is a partially fictionalized memoir or fiction based on the author's own experiences is an interesting question. But more important is how Payne deftly employs a memoirist's psychological insight along with a novelist's skill in structure, pace, and narrative voice to create a haunting book that resonates authentic depth of emotion.

Burning Tulips comes to us through Red Hen Press, a lively independent publisher bringing out some terrific poetry, memoir, and fiction that would never find a place with today's megapublishers focused on high-concept bestsellers. Bestsellers have their place: the beach or long airplane flights-situations where passing the time is more important than challenging the heart and mind with literature. Discerning readers will instead be far more satisfied with the excellent Burning Tulips than any garden-variety bestseller. In short, it's a beautiful book well worth reading.

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Erinn Batykefer’s award-winning debut collection given a 4 1/2 star review on Library Thing:

“The mark of excellent poetry is that it leads you to places you could never find on your own. Erinn Batykefer’s collection of poetry “ Allegheny, Monongahela “ does that and more. Far from a simple collection of poetry, Allegheny, Monongahela tells an interwoven story of growing up in Western Pennsylvania based in part on titles of the paintings of Georgia Keeffe while relating a sometimes beautiful, sometimes violent, often depressing family history.

The pallet of language Batykefer paints with is far broader than most poets. And unlike many collections, never once throughout the interlaced poems does her voice falter. Some poems “ such as Eureka Vacuum “ stand alone using the simple images of childhood. In other cases, two or three poems flow together to paint an overall image of life and death. Three poems in particular speak to the loss of her grandfather, ending with the powerful Death in the Family, which sent me off to call my insurance agent and schedule a physical. The Inheritance bears witness to a fight between her mother and sister. It is done so well because rather than placing you in the room, she is able to make you experience the memory of it instead. While often dark, there are glimpses of the beauty of the region such as in Two Yellow Leaves, describing autumn along the Allegheny River. Anyone who has ever spent any time in Pittsburgh will find instant familiarity in Pittsburgh as Self-Portrait I and II. The Whiteout wraps the feelings of depression tightly within the imagery of a long Northeastern winter. I read Horizontal Horse’s or Mule’s Skull with Feather four times“ and loved it more with each reading.

Poetry collections often miss the mark by surrounding several great poems with groups of mediocrity. Allegheny, Monongahela does no such thing. If you have any interest in poetry and you want a collection that reads like a novella, you need to pick up a copy. I, for one, will be reading it over and over again.”

Check out all the Library Thing reviews of Erinn’s work.

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Ching-In Chen’s debut collection of poems is a sprawling and ambitious work …. I found myself admiring the book for being so satisfyingly messy, for allowing itself to sprawl and digress and experiment and explore …. I’m always glad to see identity politics become nuanced, rather than abandoned, ”since our differences don’t go away, they just get more complicated. The book presents identity as being uncontainable, with permeable boundaries, ”sexuality rubs up against nationality, ethnicity, gender, generation and many other categories. We can’t return to a easy ideas of who we are, and if there’s one thing that Chen avoids, it’s easy ideas.

A lot of the most exciting prose published in the last couple years is enlivened by the introduction of non-English elements. The Times Book Review made note of the way Spanish and the argot of geekdom gave wings to Junot Diaz's prose in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Likewise, the pressure of Slavic syntax gives the writing in Aleksander Hemon's Nowhere Man a concrete, impacted quality, an almost granular particularity of word against word. It has gotten to the point, though, where you wonder if monolingual English speakers can write the kind of prose worth talking about beyond the basics of plot, character, and setting.

Read more.

Reviewed by Matt Dube in Diagram 8.2

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6 + 1: Interview with Timothy Green

I introduce a new feature, the "6 + 1" interview. I ask my guests six questions, and they get to ask me one question in return.

My first interview is with Timothy Green, editor of the poetry journal RATTLE. Thank you Tim! His poems have appeared in The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and Nimrod International Journal, among others. Green has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and is winner of the 2006 Phi Kappa Phi award from the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet Megan O'Reilly Green.

Read Interview by clicking on THIS link.

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Memory provides the raw material for the stories we tell about ourselves. Or maybe memories are fictions themselves, vague impressions of feelings combined with fleeting shards of images woven together by gossamer threads of narrative that pull one into the next until an approximation of past reality emerges like the tail end of a dream that comes just before waking.

Maybe that's too Freudian an interpretation of what Brooklyn-based writer and psychologist Marc Kaminsky is up to in Shadow Traffic, his latest work published recently by Red Hen Press. Indeed, Kaminsky seems more Jungian in his thinking and his seeming embrace of Karl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. In Shadow Traffic, Kaminsky is less concerned with his own personal memo¬ries than those that drift on the sea of Jewish memory, which wash up on his literary shore more like seaweed-tangled flotsam than messages stuffed in bottles.

Read full review in the current issue of the American Book Review

May/June 2009 issue Volume 3, No. 4

Language can be an intriguing subject, and author Orlando White explores the language we speak every day, English. "Bone Light" is his discussion through verse of the subject, exploring the nuances and treating English as if it were a foreign language in concept.

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The stories in Greg Sanders's debut collection are difficult to categorize. They owe a debt to Franz Kafka and fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges but seem just as strongly to want to transmit from a realist world where small psychological insights and gritty detail carry the day. The stories aspire to the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too achievement of existing in both literal and symbolic realms. Many of them reach this rare ground….

by Scott Elliott

Read the entire review (PDF)

American Book Review May/June 2009 Issue Volume 3 No.4

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AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, Vol. 30, No. 4, May/June 2009

"Author of the prize-winning novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts (2001), editor of several literary anthologies and numerous essays and stories published widely in literary magazines, DeWitt Henry is perhaps best known as the founding editor of Ploughshares. This memoir, packed with Henry's personal life and growth as an artist, also traces the launching and the daily struggles of one of America's top literary magazines. But this is more than memoir's also a philosophical work, a speculative work. It's above all a masterpiece of form and style. Henry is the consummate craftsman, his eye out for the right word, his pulse tuned to the right mood. I think of this memoir as a fine piece of orchestral music, enriched by its different movements and moods–everything building, everything contributing to a pleasing harmonic whole…

This memoir is like a fine piece of orchestral music, enriched by its different movements and moods."

Read full review.

American Book Review May/June 2009 issue Volume 3 No. 4

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DeWitt Henry, mon sembable, mon frere, was two years behind me at Amherst, but way ahead of me in life. While the rest of us were yearning for graduate school, he was already a writer; he took over the college litmag as a sophomore.

He presided over Ploughshares for its first 20 years.

His gathering of autobiographical essays, Safe Suicide, just published by Red Hen Press, smote me with its harrowing accounts of…fathering…litmagging….refilling a printer ink cartridge…running the Boston Marathon as a bandit….getting older….

DeWitt tells it by the numbers: how much he earned, how many fingers-wide his pregnant wife was dilated when they reached the hospital, how much they paid for their house, how much a lavish fundraiser actually brought to the bottom line.

Read more.

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The work of the poet is one of reassessment: it's a continual look at the intricacies and minutiae of a world outfitted with a voluminous gadgetry of words. Poems, at best, are samplings of larger pieces of a broad experience. They reveal the urge to speak with an authoritative voice through the systems of language. Orlando White's debut book of poetry, Bone Light, delves beyond instinct and intellect, utterance and music, letters and numbers. It is poetry that scrutinizes language and syntax with ginger strokes of forceful questioning.

The tone of the book is established in the first poem, "Everything I write requires this: Alphabet."

White situates his poems squarely between the breaches of narrative and its decisive uses, and a fractured landscape of words and lines. What follows through the remaining 32 poems is a book that explores –at times riffles–the poet's own boundaries as a writer.

Throughout Bone Light there are consistent literal and figurative "skeletal" allusions and references to bones transforming into language itself, establishing an expository source for the poems. Thematically, these images anchor the reader to the poems that are markedly individual, both in style and content, but fit it well as a series. What edges on the repetitive, perhaps slight overuse of such imagery, is ultimately curved by a tenacious exploration of subject that consequentially leads to each poem starting the conversation anew. Poems such as "From Skin to Bone," "Skeleton" and "Blank Skull," reiterate the relevance of the passage of time and memory as a way of shaping and reconciling the past.

'Sentence," a poem that includes lines, "Letters can appear as bones," followed by the parenthetical, "Do not forget the image," and the conclusion, "If you write with calcium," introduces the reader to White's spare lines and playfully applied syntax, while never straying too far into abstraction. This and other poems, including a series of five that explore and meditate on the letters "i" and "j," suggest that the disjointed line allow for a closer representation of its subject rather than more laborious sentences that are tirelessly shaped into grammatical sense. In other words, the poems of Bone Light are un-forced and un-patterned. They are stylistically risky and refreshingly non-committal to form and tradition, but engage the reader fully.

Ultimately, Bone Light is a map of the poet's life, where the entireties of White's experiences are revealed at once. It is a body filled with nuance, discovery and movement. Its poems are challenging, void or irrelevant obscurities and remain welcoming throughout their remarkable approach.

By Gabriel Gomez, Local iQ Vol. 4 Iss. 9